Introduction

Welcome to Liferay’s tutorials and Learning Paths! Both show you how to build powerful, robust apps using Liferay’s tools, frameworks, and APIs. The first few sections here are Learning Paths. Learning Paths walk you through the development of a specific example application from start to finish, beginning with setting up your development environment and ending with a fully functional example application. They’re called Learning Paths because they’re designed to be followed from beginning to end and cover multiple topics along the way. Learning Paths are thus ideal for getting started with Liferay development. Currently, the following learning paths are available:

The sections that follow the Learning Paths are tutorials. Rather than spanning the multiple topics a Learning Path requires to produce a specific example application, tutorials go more in depth on individual topics, and don’t yield a complete example application. Although tutorials also contain example code, this code is general and is designed to give you the information you need on only the topics of your choosing. You can then apply this to your own custom Liferay applications. This makes tutorials better suited to those with some experience in Liferay development. The tutorials cover the following three main areas:

Since many developers coming to Liferay already have a set of tools they use, these tutorials assume you’re using one of three common environments: 1) An Ant-based command-line environment that integrates with a wide variety of tools, 2) The easy-to-use Liferay IDE that minimizes your learning curve while giving you powerful development features, and 3) Maven, a widely adopted project management system. The Liferay Developer Network provides learning paths and tutorials that teach you how to use these three environments.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

If you don’t like Eclipse (which Liferay IDE is based on) and prefer to use NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, or something else, you certainly can. Liferay code can be written in any way Java code is written.

As a developer wanting to run your own applications on top of Liferay Portal, you probably want to know what’s the best and quickest way to do it? Liferay supports two main, standards-based technologies for incorporating your applications into Liferay: Portlets and OpenSocial gadgets. Portlets can be written using any of the Java web frameworks that support portlet development, including Liferay’s MVC Portlet framework and JavaServer™ Faces (JSF).

As you write apps, you’ll want to leverage powerful frameworks that work seamlessly with Liferay and help you complete your app faster. Liferay contains several frameworks that give you all the tools you need to perform various common tasks that you don’t want to write yourself, such as handling permissions and letting users enter comments, categories, and tags.

In addition to Liferay’s frameworks, you’ll want to check out the powerful tag libraries and snazzy UI components that AlloyUI and Liferay UI Taglibs provide.